5 Essays about Traveling Ideas
Ideas can travel in different contexts, but they also reach their limits. 5 essays about traveling ideas and their barriers.
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How do you say Ballroom in German? (Part 2)
In her second essay, Sophie Yukiko continues her critical examination of the German Ballroom culture. She observes that it holds huge potential because from its earliest days, it has always been a space for discussion, criticism, adjustment and conversation.
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How do you say Ballroom in German? (Part 1)
German-American writer, performance artist and cultural curator Sophie Yukiko looks back on a decade of creating and experiencing Ballroom Culture in Germany. With a critical look on the reproduction of powerdynamics, she tries to find out what happened between 1980’s Harlem and today while diving into the conflicts and potentials of the German scene.
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Call for Submissions – Being from
This is our third call for submissions and we are looking for pieces about being from. Please send us your pitch!
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Dispersals
Jessica J. Lee’s third book, Dispersals, On Plants, Borders and Belonging, consists of fourteen personal essays about plants crossing borders and putting down roots in new places. Lee chooses several trees, shrubs and algae, which hold meaning in her own life, to engage with their history and journeys into different parts of the world. In doing so, she questions under what circumstances species are considered either cosmopolitan or invasive.
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If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
After the revolution, a woman and a man become acquainted in a café in Cairo. A romance develops between the two of them, but it then takes a violent turn.
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Life isn’t All Haha Heehee
Meera Syal’s Life isn’t All Haha Heehee follows the lives of three best friends who grew up together in the Punjabi community of East London.
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Babel
In the Old Testament, the story of The Tower of Babel is told: in reaction to the hubris of humankind, God spreads people across the world and muddles up their languages. The barriers to understanding thus become the penalty for humankind’s hubris. R. F. Kuang’s Babel takes place in a similar time of human arrogance: in 1836, Oxford – with its fictive Royal Institute for Translation, informally known as Babel – is at the centre of the British Empire.
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Anita and Me
In Meera Syal’s semi-autobiographical novel, Meena Kumar is the only Indian girl in the former British mining village of Tollington. While her parents wait in vain for their daughter’s sudden and definitive metamorphosis into the model Indian girl, all Meena wants is to be a Tollington wench.
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Shakespeare travelling
If your interests lie with the postcolonial, Shakespeare might seem like an unlikely port of call. Or rather, he might seem representative of a lot of the things a postcolonial approach would be interested in working against. He could, for instance, represent what needs to be removed in calls to ‘decolonize the university’: a dead […]
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